"At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in." Discuss.

Why can't you just write apps using native, compiled languages? If C or C++ is too much hassle for a small GUI app, why not use Vala or D? Hell, Vala was created by gnome! (afaik)

I'm writing a Vala application. It's quite nice in many ways... but its string manipulation functions are often pathetic. For example, I could find no way (short of coding the function myself) to concatenate an array of strings short of iterating through and doing it bit by bit.

...and, as with any language, the selection of readily-available libraries has its strengths and weaknesses.

For example, I don't remember seeing an equivalent to Python's highly-lenient, highly-unit-tested feedparser library in Vala, but Vala has access to an interesting SQLite ORM named SQLHeavy which Python only gained access to when it added GObject introspection support.